Synthetic transaction monitoring is an approach used to monitor the performance and availability of services and applications. In conventional systems, performing periodic, synthetic transactions against these services can skew other monitored statistics. For example, in some systems the cost of the service is dependent on the amount of usage. In such cases, the periodic synthetic transactions inflate the monitored usage and can incur real costs to the user. Additionally, the inflated usage monitoring can make statistics less accurate for other purposes, such as determining if application usage meets expected levels or business plans.